About Over the Air

Over the Air is a grass-roots mobile developer event that is completely unique in the mobile industry events calendar – it is free to attend, is hands-on in the style of hack-days and bar-camps, covers the cutting edge of current mobile development (as opposed to glossy future-speak or sales-pitches), and features bean bags, a big party and an overnight sleep-over.

There will also be a competition at the end of the event for the best categories of applications created during the event, with many great prizes to be won.

2010 - September 10th & 11th - Imperial College London

This year’s programme is currently being put together, but will once again feature technical presentations, tutorials, workshops, and break-out rooms. Expect topics such as Open Source, Java, Symbian (Series-60), Mobile Web, Mobile Ajax, Android, Mobile Linux, iPhone, Windows Mobile, Blackberry, etc.

If you would like to run a session at Over the Air, please take moment to fill in our session suggestion form. The sessions will be 55 minutes in length and while the focus of the event is on mobile development, we are also accepting sessions on user experience and design and we are putting together some sessions on mobile art which will hopefully also be featured in a Mobile Art Gallery on site.

We are currently looking for sponsors, to ensure that event is completely free to attend – if you’d like to take advantage of a great opportunity to reach an audience of 400+ mobile developers and enthusiasts from across the UK and Europe, please contact helen at overtheair dot org or margaret at overtheair dot org.

Over the Air is brought to you by:

Mobile Monday London

and Lonely Planet

2009

The second Over the Air, once again got a great turn out of people and some really nice press coverage. Check out Ewan Spence's  BBC article on how to 'Hack a handset'!

The recipe is simple.

Take as many mobile phone developers, hackers and builders as you can find; put them in The Great Hall at Imperial College; add a liberal helping of heavyweight companies talking about new tools, developer aids and techniques to program mobile phones during the day; then challenge them to come up with "something new".

Leave this to simmer as hackers work through the night and have everyone present their new programs to the rest of the conference the next day.

That sums up the Over the Air hackathon. Now in its second year of bringing together the UK's mobile developer community, it continues to have a huge impact on those who get involved with the overnight competition.

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2008

The inaugural Over the Air event ran on the 4th and 5th of April, 2008, at Imperial College London. Mobile developers from all stripes descended on the campus for 2 days of fun, learning, hacking, and socializing.The coverage of Over the Air was great, with online stories from The Guardian, The Register and many bloggers. Some of the best coverage however came from Mark Kramer with his videos on the popular video site Qik. There were also plenty of photos on flickr.There has been a range of comments and blog posts about Over the Air including,

Then there was the hacking in the evening. I wasn’t as hardcore as some, and did have a nap for an hour or two at about 5am before finishing my stuff off after breakfast. Most of what I wrote was in C++ but I also got to hack together a little Javascript - not a language I often use.

- Dale Lane

What did I learn there and was it relevant for my project? Well, first, it was an opportunity for me to get a brief overview of current developing technology for the mobile platform.There are many and a lot of different technology to learn which I am not familiar with. Of particular interest was a presentation by Brian Fling from flingmedia.com on developing web apps and native apps for the iPhone and mobile applications.

- Alex Craxton of Mobile Monday London

We went to the excellent overtheair event over the weekend, with an amazing concentration of mobile developers (and gadgets). Our entry to the 24-hour hack development contest was a bit of fun dreamt up by Richard Jones and Russ Anderson. Disappointed that someone had beaten them to it by working out how to connect a Wiimote to a phone handset via bluetooth, they decided to go one better and do away with the need for the Wiimote at all.

- Lastminute Labs

Kudos to the whole team who made this happen, this was more than just a developers’ conference, more than just a workshop or a barcamp… It was a 48 hours of mobile and wireless development experiment bringing together some +400 developers and mobile industry experts with great sessions on various industry related topics… Lots of great people and ideas gathered during these 2 days

- Rudy De Waele at m-trends.org

Thanks to all who spoke, presented, attended, developed, organized, ushered, registered, hauled, evacuated, waited, partied, slept and generally made this such a fantastic event. Watch back here for updates on what happened and and after the event, presentations from speakers, related news and announcements about the next Over the Air!